Guo Yuhua is one of China’s best-known sociologists and most incisive government critics. A professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, she has devoted her career to researching human suffering in Chinese society, especially that of peasants, the promised beneficiaries of Communist rule. Born in 1956, Guo grew up in one of the “big courtyards” of government housing compounds
An ordinary winter evening in the Legation Quarter of Peking, where foreign embassies and consulates were located, January 7, 1937. Cold. The heavy sound of Japanese armored cars, out on patrol down the busy shopping streets that flank the Forbidden City. (Japan would occupy the city seven months later.) The martial sounds and the crowds seem not to distract a couple of
In the Chinese united front of the mid-1920s, the Soviet agent Borodin has been a protean figure. Bringing Leninist skills, arms, and advisers to Canton, he seemed to be the priceless ingredient that finally catalyzed Sun Yat-sen’s revolution. Borodin drafted the Kuomintang’s constitution and taught it how to be revolutionary long enough to take power. He really put the
On September 29, 1910, a young Chinese cook in Berkeley named George Fong bought himself a .38 caliber revolver. The next day he hiked up into the hills behind the fraternity house where he worked at the University of California, found a secluded valley amongst the brown grasses and sprawling nurseries of eucalyptus, and taught himself how to shoot. One week later, he made his
Antique Maps of China, Japan and Korea. Gallery of authentic historic and rare maps of China, Japan, Korea (Corea) from the 16th to the 19th centuries.